THE MEANING OF A SYMPOSIUM

Georges Cottier

In re-reading its history, which soon will reach the throes of the Third Millennium, how can the Church of Christ not turn its attention to its relations with the Jewish people? In fact, It knows that this people is loved by God, that it was chosen to announce the coming of Christ. It knows that the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable (cf. Romans 11, 29). It knows that it is from him that the Incarnate Word took his humanity and whose holy Mother, the Virgin Mary, was a Jew, just as Saint John the Baptist, Saint Joseph, the Apostles, and Saint Stephen, the first martyr were all Jews. This is the first fact, not at all external from the saving design of God.

For our reflection we are therefore lead to reexamine the past, in a way which will allow for a purification of memory. In this instance, what does memory mean? The place in which we keep the traces of the memories of history, both happy and unhappy ones? Certainly it is this. But much more, a similar work of the memory makes sense, as we have learned from Saint Augustine, but only if we introduce to the memory sui, and this by its turn will bring us to the memory Dei. It deals with a movement of spiritual ascension and also of the deepening of the interior of oneself.

In other words, we are called to the memory of our own identity, with the needs that this involves, to the light of the design of God. The purification of the memory is possible only if we start with a look at faith; and of theological nature. On the theme which will involve us, the documentation is in excess, often of excellent quality, but also circulating are many approximations, mixtures and sometimes there are also accusations in large amounts. How could it be otherwise? The weight of the transpired sufferings leads to passionate reactions which shouldn't surprise.

It is important to note that the question, in its deepest essence, is doctrinal. Purifying the memory means taking on a work of truth: the facts being duly established and known, it deals with understanding the sense of the mystery of the saving plan of God. The IX-XI chapters of the epistle to the Romans have cleared the major prospective of this mystery. Finally, the comprehension must lead to an attitude of conversion. Only then, in truth, can we speak about the purification of memory.

These small considerations which precede will help, I hope, to understand why the symposium was reserved to Christian theologians, sons and daughters of the Church. The purpose is not at all political; it is ethical in the exact measure in which the Christian ethic is intended as a coherence of life with professed faith; and in particular, theological. Not exclusion, but the limitation of one theme, which should allow the better circumscription of the essential nature.

The theme of the symposium: The Roots of anti-Judaism in the Christian Environment, belongs to a wider and more general reflection, in the frame of a request of forgiveness which Christians are invited to ask on the occasion of the Great Jubilee. The questions that arise from this will not be discussed in themselves, but will at the horizon of our work. To this end, Tertio Millennio Adveniente gives us some strong points. The first is the understanding of the contrast that exists between the holiness of the Church of Christ and the sin of its children. This understanding, which is the suffering of the heart of the believer, is a necessary condition of the theological readings of the history of the Church: «Although she is holy because of her incorporation into Christ, the Church does not tire of doing penance: before God and man she always acknowledges as her own her sinful sons and daughters» (n. 33, which then cites Lumen Gentium 8). The Church is holy, the holiness of Christ communicates that, incessantly producing the seeds of holiness. The look of faith brought onto holiness is primordial and determined. When we sin, we subtract this influx of life from us, we put ourselves in contradiction with the needs of our baptism and with the dynamism of the integral assimilation to Christ, which this generates. The Church does not give in to our infidelities and to our betrayals; it searches for the lost to bring them on the path of salvation: «it does not tire of doing penance».

The second major point on which we will focus on is also proclaimed in the same n. 33: «the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel and, instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the values of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal».

Consequently, the asking of forgiveness, must first be addressed to God, in that each sin is an offense made onto Him, to the Church which the sin of Christians betrays, and to those who had the right of witness, walking to encounter Christ, and that we have scandalized. There are various forms of anti-Judaism. Some are anterior to Christianity. The modern anti-Semitsim, whose extreme manifestation was the racist folly of national-socialism, and of a pagan essence; is, in its deepest aim, an anti-Christianism. The unimaginable cruelty for which it is responsible, reminded some sleepy Christian consciences «the tie which spiritually links the people of the New Testament with the race of Abraham» (Nostra Aetate, 4).

Finally, there are some readings which are theologically incorrect or wrong in the New Testament, and which have served as a pretext of a hostility which was diffused in large portions of the Christian populations, in which the Jewish population found itself scattered. Too many unjustifiable attitudes found their justification; and from there is born in many Christians a passivity and an absence of reaction when Europe was in the throes of the violent Hitlerian wave. Other Christians, its true, did much to help save the persecuted Jews.

It does not at all deal with attenuating the seriousness of the breakage added by the Incarnation of the Son of God. The Christian faith professes that He is the true Messiah, who, died and resurrected, he is alive and present in his Church. The faith of the Jewish people, who did not recognize him equally leads to the truth of Christ, but in what was promised, they are still waiting. Two truths must guide us. The first is that the breakage did not abolish the continuity. The second is that the drama, being of a religious order, theologically, requires from our part a great nobility of feelings and a delination particular, to the liking of that of Apostle Paul (cf. Romans 9,2).

Tertio Millennio Adveniente (n.35) writes: «Another painful chapter of history to which the sons and daughters of the Church must return with a spirit of repentance is that of the acquiescence given, especially in certain centuries to intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of the truth». We will have these words present in our memory during this symposium.